Of Rumblings, Terrestrial and Otherwise

The Bay Area just felt a significant earthquake, a 5.6 centered just north of San Jose. Communications are still spotty a half hour later, but thankfully, it seems so far that any damage was minor.

Just before the earthquake, Dennis Kucinich admitted during the democratic debate on MSNBC that he had indeed seen a UFO, as was recently reported, while visiting Shirley MacLaine, his children's godmother. Theory: the aliens were angered by this disclosure and chose to send a message to Shirley MacLaine, but missed by a few hundred miles.

Jason and the Afterthoughts

In 1978, Sean S. Cunningham set out to make a "real scary movie" called Long Night at Camp Blood. Then it hit him: the film should instead be called Friday the 13th. Like any good director, he promptly hired a New York ad agency to develop a logo for the unmade film and bought a full-page ad in Variety.

While scouting locations, Cunningham stumbled across a boy scout camp in northern New Jersey called No-Be-Bo-Sco. He rented the camp and proceeded to make his film. Buried in this real-life Camp Crystal Lake's site is one small reference to this fact. The boy scouts and Cunningham had rung the death knell of casual sex among promiscuous 70s youths, at least in any outdoor setting.

The Architectural Style They Named the Band After

Bauhaus, the architecture movement, celebrates its 75th anniversary sometime around now. A quarter century ago, Tom Wolfe, the perenially white-suited author of The Electic Kool-aid Acid Test penned From Bauhaus to Our House, a scathing indictment of the unadorned façades that characterize the Bauhaus style. This man hates glass office towers like Marx hated income disparity. Now that beach reading is finally over, there's no sense in not reading this 125-page epic. He may not be Rem Koolhaas, but hey, who would want him to be?

Baby Doc, where art thou?

Haiti's former dictator, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, once a multi-millionaire thanks to his adept kleptocracy, now lives in a run-down one-bedroom apartment in Paris with his girlfriend, Veronique Roy.

This is the fist in our "snapshot of a dictator" series which aims to answer the by-the-millisecond approach to coverage of less important historical figures.

Link an in-depth WSJ piece from 2003.

The Pervasive Music of Modern Life

In an episode on mapping, This American Life, among other things, analyzed the "music" produced by a typical office. The fan whirrs in F#, the computer hums in G, and the copier strikes an Augmented D third.

The root notes of these sounds were then played together on a keyboard. At times the result was beyond dischordant, horrible. How does this affect the worker's psyche? An interesting phenom. The Bay Press therefore pledges to one day feature not only excellent feng shui, but harmonic tuning of all its office machines, in its planned 176-story tower.

Link to episode 110 of This American Life. Available for free on iTunes podcasts.

"We may our ends by our beginnings know"

--John Denham

Welcome to the Bay Press, an entirely arbitrary agglomeration of media and ideas. Mostly we will seek to avoid covering anything already featured in mass market media, though we may bend the rules if we see fit here. And we will use the "royal we" at will, even when only one person is posting.

RDC